Android Studio vs Bazel

Overview

Android Studio

Stacks25.5K

Followers20.3K

Votes361

Bazel

Stacks313

Followers579

Votes133

Android Studio vs Bazel: What are the differences?

Android Studio: Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA. Android Studio is a new Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA. It provides new features and improvements over Eclipse ADT and will be the official Android IDE once it's ready; Bazel: Correct, reproducible, fast builds for everyone. Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment.

Android Studio can be classified as a tool in the "Integrated Development Environment" category, while Bazel is grouped under "Java Build Tools".

Some of the features offered by Android Studio are:

Flexible Gradle-based build system.
Build variants and multiple APK generation.
Expanded template support for Google Services and various device types.

On the other hand, Bazel provides the following key features:

Multi-language support: Bazel supports Java, Objective-C and C++ out of the box, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages.
High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. By contrast, with tools like Make you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations.
Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build both server applications running on systems in our data centers and client apps running on mobile phones.

"Android studio is a great tool, getting better and bet " is the top reason why over 164 developers like Android Studio, while over 18 developers mention "Fast" as the leading cause for choosing Bazel.

Bazel is an open source tool with 12.4K GitHub stars and 2.02K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Bazel's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Android Studio has a broader approval, being mentioned in 928 company stacks & 690 developers stacks; compared to Bazel, which is listed in 11 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.

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Advice on Android Studio, Bazel

William

Sep 10, 2019

Needs advice

The problem I have is whether to choose Android Studio or Visual Studio? I have to develop a simple app for a school project that can work on both iPhone and Android.

The most important factors for me are Android and iOS compatibility. Although note that i would like to become a Software Engineer when i finish my course. (I'd like to work for Apple, just saying!)

After that id like easy integration for Google Ads and such if i do develop another app that people actually use to support development. (I'd also like to stick with one easy programming language that's compatible with a wide variety of platforms since i'm a beginner and have only ever used Pascal)

565k views565k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Android Studio	Bazel
Android Studio is a new Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA. It provides new features and improvements over Eclipse ADT and will be the official Android IDE once it's ready.	Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment.
Flexible Gradle-based build system.;Build variants and multiple APK generation.;Expanded template support for Google Services and various device types.;Rich layout editor with support for theme editing.;Lint tools to catch performance, usability, version compatibility, and other problems.;ProGuard and app-signing capabilities.;Built-in support for Google Cloud Platform, making it easy to integrate Google Cloud Messaging and App Engine.	Multi-language support: Bazel supports Java, Objective-C and C++ out of the box, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages;High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. By contrast, with tools like Make you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations;Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build both server applications running on systems in our data centers and client apps running on mobile phones;Reproducibility: In BUILD files, each library, test, and binary must specify its direct dependencies completely. Bazel uses this dependency information to know what must be rebuilt when you make changes to a source file, and which tasks can run in parallel. This means that all builds are incremental and will always produce the same result;Scalable: Bazel can handle large builds
Statistics
Stacks 25.5K	Stacks 313
Followers 20.3K	Followers 579
Votes 361	Votes 133
Pros & Cons
Pros 176 Android studio is a great tool, getting better and bet 103 Google's official android ide 37 Intelligent code editor with lots of auto-completion 25 Its powerful and robust 5 Easy creating android app Cons 4 Slow emulator 4 Huge memory usage 2 Using Intellij IDEA, while Intellij IDEA have too 2 No checking incompatibilities 2 Complex for begginers	Pros 28 Fast 20 Deterministic incremental builds 17 Correct 16 Multi-language 14 Enforces declared inputs/outputs Cons 3 No Windows Support 2 Bad IntelliJ support 1 Poor windows support for some languages 1 Lack of Documentation 1 Constant breaking changes
Integrations
Android SDK	Java Objective-C C++

What are some alternatives to Android Studio, Bazel?

PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a PHP IDE which keeps up with latest PHP & web languages trends, integrates a variety of modern tools, and brings even more extensibility with support for major PHP frameworks.

IntelliJ IDEA

Out of the box, IntelliJ IDEA provides a comprehensive feature set including tools and integrations with the most important modern technologies and frameworks for enterprise and web development with Java, Scala, Groovy and other languages.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications.

WebStorm

WebStorm is a lightweight and intelligent IDE for front-end development and server-side JavaScript.

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE is FREE, open source, and has a worldwide community of users and developers.

PyCharm

PyCharm’s smart code editor provides first-class support for Python, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, CSS, popular template languages and more. Take advantage of language-aware code completion, error detection, and on-the-fly code fixes!

Apache Maven

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

Eclipse

Standard Eclipse package suited for Java and plug-in development plus adding new plugins; already includes Git, Marketplace Client, source code and developer documentation. Click here to file a bug against Eclipse Platform.

RubyMine

JetBrains RubyMine IDE provides a comprehensive Ruby code editor aware of dynamic language specifics and delivers smart coding assistance, intelligent code refactoring and code analysis capabilities.

Gradle

Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by Android Studio are:

Flexible Gradle-based build system.
Build variants and multiple APK generation.
Expanded template support for Google Services and various device types.

On the other hand, Bazel provides the following key features:

Multi-language support: Bazel supports Java, Objective-C and C++ out of the box, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages.
High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. By contrast, with tools like Make you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations.
Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build both server applications running on systems in our data centers and client apps running on mobile phones.

Bazel is an open source tool with 12.4K GitHub stars and 2.02K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Bazel's open source repository on GitHub.

Android Studio vs Bazel